Barriers to Organizational Democracy in Public Administration

This essay explores the forms that organizational democracy might take in public administration and argues that organizational democracy need not be incompatible with principles of representative democracy. Democratizing work life in public organizations is viewed as a way to develop members' interpersonal skills, decrease buck-passing, increase job satisfaction, productivity, and public-bureaucratic contacts, recruit talented leadership, and engender more creative solutions to pubiic problems. Barriers to work democratization in public bureaucracy derive from the prevailing political arrangements; the needs, habits, and interests of organizational elites; the folkways and organizational ideologies found in public bureaucracies; the bureaucratic socialization and reward system; and the competitive impact of alternative "change models." Despite these obstacles, potential opportunities for structural change that may be unique to public as against large-scale private organizations are discernible, suggesting that a change strategy fostering organizational democracy by accretion or encroaching control has some likelihood of long-run success.